Christmas is over, and so the maternal guilt has begun.? Specifically, I am currently feeling guilty for throwing away toys.? I mean, I stand by the decision - the house is finite, and the toys were taking over the world.? I’ve ditched almost nothing that arrived this week (almost nothing), and the vast bulk is soft toys that Daisy’s never really played with, or else hasn’t played with for a very long time.? If anything, I’ve probably not thrown away enough.? But every single decision left me rocking in a corner, in case I was getting rid of the wrong thing.

Seriously, folks: my kids do not need any more soft toys.? Possibly ever again.? Also, I think we have all the toy tea-sets we’ll ever need, now.? I reckon we had the right number of presents under the tree - sadly, we were three sacks away from having finished, at that point.

I sound so ungrateful, don’t I?? It’s just that I’ve spent the last five days looking at the pile of Stuff in my living room, and wondering where I’m supposed to put it all.? Fighting the urge to wonder why my friends and family hate me so much as to fill my life with all this Stuff, when they all know that I’ve spent the last five years trying to simplify my life - to live the Flylady way.

And of course, I know.? It’s not about seeking to make me miserable, it’s about loving my children enough to buy nice things for them.? I do get it, really.? But then, that leads back to the guilt.? Because we cannot possibly keep it all, but it’s me that has to throw things away, knowing that they were bought with love, for someone who isn’t me.

If I had just one wish, I think it would be for less volume.? When I was a child, we never got more than one present from one person, and I was taken by surprise by the literal sackloads that some people sent.? We only gave the kids one thing each - and with no particular reference to monetary value, either.? One present is one present, especially at this age.

I did my bit - I bought a bigger toy cupboard.? Now it’s time for someone else to help me out.

I bet you didn’t know that I grew up with a band? Well, kinda. When I was a very small child, we lived in a three-bed end terrace in Liverpool 4, which has since had a two storey extension added to the side, and is probably a four or five bedroom terrace by now. The house was just around the corner from the church that we went to. The church has always been inextricably linked with my family, for generations. Even now, I have aunts and uncles and cousins, and who knows what else, there. At the time, my parents were part of an evangelistic group called Agap?, along with my dad’s sister, brother, brother’s girlfriend/fianc?e/wife, cousin, and a whole range of others, who were involved in various ways, to various extents, and for various periods of time. My mum was in charge of The Bookings, the money, and of not being allowed to go to things because of the children. My dad used to preach, I think, and Neil, and Jan, and Carol and Eric used to sing.

Mostly they sang songs that Neil had written. They used to call it “gospel”, but it wasn’t gospel in a black sense. If anything, it was black gospel meets seventies folk. They even made a couple of tapes which they distributed… well, I’ve no idea how widely they were distributed, but we had half a dozen, on the off-chance that we met someone who wanted one.

The first tape was called Reason For Living, and this is the one that was an integral part of my childhood. Other children pretend to be pop stars, or cartoon characters. We used to play the tape, and pretend to be Aunty Jan.

We were children, and children don’t analyse things. They certainly don’t analyse for lyrical quality, or musical depth, or significance of meaning. Listening to it again, now, I’m struck by how Neil’s lyrical style probably benefited enormously from the first time he bought a modern bible translation - some of the songs are taken verbatim from scripture, which I’m all in favour of, I just don’t understand what they’re saying. That speaks of my lack of education, I suppose - I bet they knew what the songs meant. More than that, though, I’m bowled over by the sheer optimism of the songs. The open-hearted naivety.

I don’t know how Neil and Carol and Jan look back at Agap?. I suspect that they’re the tiniest bit embarrassed, in the way that everyone is embarrassed when they look at their creative efforts of two or three decades ago. Times have changed, styles have changed, and more importantly, they’ve changed - mellowed, matured, not to be any better or worse, just to follow the normal and natural development of life. They’re no more the teens and twenty-somethings they were then, than I’m the four-year-old.

It’s not mine, so I don’t have to get embarrassed by it. My Agap? tape is a huge part of the backdrop of my childhood, and I hold it in great affection for that reason. I also admire the courage, the vision, and the desperate desire the please God that led them to make it - they had more passion and motivation when they were little more than kids themselves, than I’ve ever had.

Scrabble - a game I prefer to play,
because I’m better at it

Part of our holiday was, for me, a journey of self-discovery (as opposed to the journey of sheep-discovery that was required to get to the house we stayed in) (I’m not calling it a holiday cottage, since it was a house by anyone’s standards, and one that you could have fitted two of mine inside). Self-discovery, in my experience, is not much fun, so to be avoided when you’re supposed to be on holiday. Of course, it is also true that on holiday, you get the chance to depart from the norms enough to discover yourself in the first place, but I digress.I am fiercely competative. I didn’t know. Did you already know that? Because I didn’t. I naturally assumed that since I’m not remotely ambitious, I wasn’t competative either, but it’s not true.

Example 1: we played several games on holiday, and I was rubbish at them. I was rubbish at the dictionary game, in which someone picks an obscure word from the dictionary, we all make up a definition, then vote for the most plausible one. You get a point if the majority of people vote for your definition, and you get a point for voting for the correct definition. Everyone else was giving their vote to the funny ones, in order to bestow a point to the originator as a demonstration of their appreciation. I was voting for the most plausible, because I wanted to win.

Example 2: we also played a game called Take Two. It’s a variation on Scrabble, using the pieces but not the board, and it works best with between two and four players. You each take 7 pieces, and attempt to arrange them onto one interlocking grid, using only valid words. As soon as one person had done so, they call, “Take Two”, and everyone takes two more pieces, which can be a lifesaver, or can throw you into complete disarray. The winner is the first to form a complete grid once all the spare pieces have gone. The thing is, skills-wise, it’s completely different to Scrabble. You succeed with being able to arrange your pieces into small words, quickly. I’m rubbish at doing things quickly (and with the meandering pace of life that Daisy and I lead these days, I’m getting worse), and I never use a small word if three large ones will execute the task with an acceptable degree of adequacy. I was dismal at Take Two, and the humiliation was it’s a word game. I have two degrees in English, Kevin should not be able to beat me with ANYTHING that uses Scrabble letters.

Take Two, logically enough, I much preferred when it was one-on-one - the pace of the game was slowed, so I had a little more time to use all my pieces in a 12 letter word. I’m a linguistic show-off who hates to lose.

Risk, when we played it, I enjoyed much more because whilst I didn’t win, playing with Mission Cards means that the winner usually does so suddenly, and I felt like I was doing well right up to the end.

Now I’ve come face to face with this rather unattractive personality trait, I can quite see that it’s always been there. My sister hated me when we were children, because I derived immense satisfaction from beating her into the ground at any competative game we played, and when that didn’t work, I would hit her over the head with my superior vocabulary (the ultimate fall-back of many an older sibling). At school, I developed an intense dislike for a friendly, personable, and fairly attractive boy called Jonathan Thorpe, because he was always, always, always two points ahead of me in class, making him top, and me second. I didn’t want to be second. I wanted all to bow down to the mighty intellect of Ruth, and for as long as he kept doing ever so slightly better than me, nobody would.

I suppose it’s a variation on perfectionism - the idea that if you can’t guarantee to win a game, there’s really no fun in playing it, though where that leaves the poor souls who are supposed to play against me, for the sheer statisfaction of being thrashed, I don’t know. Quite what I’m supposed to do about this alarmingly self-absorbed competative streak… well, I don’t know that either.

Hello! I haven’t blogged for AGES - pretty much everything that’s come up in recent months, that appeared to me to be blogworthy, I’ve managed to persuade Kevin to write about instead, to the point that I had to do extensive research to find out what code I’ve been using to change the colour of my posts. I couldn’t for the life of me remember. I know it’s a reddy brown colour, but the hex value had completely disappeared from my head (that’s hex as in hexadecimal, not as in nasty spells in Harry Potter).

Anyway, I had the oddest dream last night. I dreamed that I took Daisy back to my old primary school, St Luke’s, and showed her off to, specifically, Mrs Hodgkinson, and Mr Baddeley. I have no idea if Mrs Hodgekinson still works as the school, though she was by far my favourite teacher at the time. I suspect not, coz the only likely-looking Janice Hodgkinson I can find on the internet is a staff governor in a school in Leicestershire.

Mr Baddeley would appear to still be the head master. I found this out when he appeared on the local TV a couple of months ago, describing his new scheme of running formal dinner parties at lunch time, to enable the children of the TV dinner generation to learn table manners and polite conversation. The children are taken out of the main dining hall in groups of six or eight, and allowed to eat in a class room, with a member of staff as their invited guest. I was struck by the fact that the children were in a blue uniform (primary schools didn’t do uniforms in our day…) and by the fact that Mr Baddeley looks essentially the same, just greyer, and rounder.

It’s twenty years, nearly, since I left the school to go the local high school (which, incidentally, I loathed, and left without so much as a backward glance when we moved house, two terms later). At that time, the staff were all Bright Young Things, high flying their way to successful careers in teaching. Mr Baddeley was only in his thirties, and already succeeding as the head of a good-sized primary school. All the staff he recruited while I was there seemed to be younger (not compared with me at ten, but looking back, they were all in their twenties and early thirties), and keen, and driven by a great desire to teach. I find the idea that Mr Baddeley and Mr Liddell are still there, still at it, quite odd - though as my mum pointed out, Mr Baddeley always had a huge heart for the children in his school, so he was never likely to be drawn away from contact with children by the pursuit of his career.

Twenty years seems like an awfully long time, though. If those two blokes have been working together in that school for all this time, they must know each other’s foibles inside out. They must have seen something in excess of six hundred children go through the school.

In my dream, Daisy was impeccably behaved, and my meetings with Mrs H and Mr B were relaxed, and adult, in a newly peer-to-peer sort of way. They had the same feel as the afternoons that Daisy and I occasionally spend with people, in real life - people from church, who are a generation or so older than I am, but since we’re all grownups, now, it doesn’t really matter. People with whom I’ve finally learned to make small talk (babies are a good focus for that sort of thing - you can take a baby anywhere, and have something to talk about).

The dream gave me an odd sort of desire to write to them - to share my sense of time having passed, and of their important part in my childhood, and in making me the adult that I’ve become. To apologise to Mr Liddell for that incident with Claire Milne and the timestables. To point out that, however annoying he found them, he had no right to kick my voila in that fit of temper, because the three or four instruments in the class wouldn’t fit under the cupboard where we were supposed to keep them (I was furious with him about that, but I said nothing at the time). To thank him for being so sensitive to my strong aversion to the Hallow’een display, even though it didn’t change anything (I was ten, and there had been much talk at church about the evilness of exposing our children to such things - I was always inclined to take that sort of statement to heart, when it was clearly aimed at the adults in the room).

I’m telling you all this, to avoid making an idiot of myself in writing to tell them. But if, by some peculiar fluke, Mr Baddeley, Mr Liddell or Mrs Hodgkinson should happen to read this, then, I raise my glass to you - you were good teachers, all of you. If we ever meet again, I shall take great delight in addressing you as Peter, David and Janice, because I can. I shall also, if I remember, thank you - I met many more bad and mediocre teachers in my scholastic career, than good ones. You bucked the trend.